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An endangered species of horse -- known as Przewalski's horse -- is much more distantly related to the domestic horse than researchers had previously hypothesized, reports a team of investigators led by Kateryna Makova, a Penn State University associate professor of biology. (7 November 2011)

09 November 2011
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Research and education programs in the basic sciences at Penn State are among the top programs in the United States, according to a comprehensive National Research Council study, updated in the spring of 2011, titled "A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States." The study uses a broad range of measurements to rank the performance of over 5,000 graduate programs in 62 fields at 212 U.S. universities, including all the major research universities.

For the first time, scientists have used large-scale DNA sequencing data to investigate a long-standing evolutionary assumption: DNA mutation rates are influenced by a set of species-specific life-history traits. The team of researchers led by Kateryna Makova, a Penn State University associate professor of biology, used whole-genome sequence data to test life-history hypotheses for 32 mammalian species, including humans. (22 September 2011)

New research by David Hughes at Penn State has revealed how infection by a parasitic fungus dramatically changes the behavior of tropical carpenter ants, causing them to become zombie-like and to die at a spot that has optimal reproductive conditions for the fungus. (29 July 2011)

The evolution and diversification of the more than 300,000 living species of flowering plants may have been "jump started" much earlier than previously calculated. According to Claude dePamphilis, a professor of biology at Penn State University and the lead author of the study, two major upheavals in the plant genome occurred hundreds of millions of years ago -- nearly 200 million years earlier than the events that other research groups had described. (12 May 2011)

Penn State biologist Tomás Carlo and his collaborators have developed a new method for tracking seed movement and germination. According to Carlo, the technique will be useful for studying plant dispersal and how plants adjust to global climate change. (13 October 2010)